


odds and ends

by mutterandmumble



Category: Ookiku Furikabutte | Big Windup!
Genre: Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Missing Scene, Pre-Canon, mild descriptions of blood/injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2020-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:13:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27833593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble
Summary: They’d been playing baseball (some of them better than others) and Mihashi had been a touch too enthusiastic in his dive for a stray ball. Now he’s strung out on the ground and flexing his hand inside of a baseball glove- worn brown leather, molded to hands slightly larger than his own and rife with broken seams- and looking down in wonder at the baseball tucked within it. It’s dirty gray struck through by red, dirt smeared over its edges and the logo half-concealed; his world spun out of orbit and stopped in the palm of his hand.Or: in which Mihashi discovers a love of baseball, and Hamada gives a gift
Relationships: Mihashi Ren & Hamada Yoshirou, No Romantic Relationship(s)
Kudos: 1





	odds and ends

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally part of a much longer fic that I started a few months ago and never finished. This section was basically a coherent, if slightly open-ended, fic by itself though, and I came across it while going through my docs and figured that I may as well upload it with a few edits for coherency. I’ll admit that I watched Oofuri months ago and don’t remember much so I’m sort of depending on past me to have known what they were talking about. That said I hope you enjoy!!!

When Mihashi Ren is eight years old, he falls in love.

And on his face, but that’s secondary to the sudden rush of bubbles in his stomach, to the sensation of being force-fed butterflies; he’s flat on the ground, dirt rough against his cheek and scraping up his knees, sun hot overhead and the concerned cries of the other children piercing sharp through his chest as they crowd around him. He remains for a moment, overcome with  _ something,  _ still but for the trembling of his arms and the slow twitching of his left legs, sprawled over the grass with his hair spread wild and his shoe half-off and his thin limbs splayed like sticks. Then he comes back to himself enough to lift his head and spat out a mouthful of soil, clambering to sit and taking in a shaky breath through his nose. His eyes have begun to water and the faces of those in front of him are blurring into the looming presence of the apartment complex, going blue like the sky and dark like the newly cloud-covered sun, and Mihashi’s world has spun out of orbit.

They’d been playing baseball (some of them better than others) and Mihashi had been a touch too enthusiastic in his dive for a stray ball. Now he’s strung out on the ground and flexing his hand inside of a baseball glove- worn brown leather, molded to hands slightly larger than his own and rife with broken seams- and looking down in wonder at the baseball tucked within it. It’s dirty gray struck through by red, dirt smeared over its edges and the logo half-concealed; his world spun out of orbit and stopped in the palm of his hand. The sort of thing that would give any person a rush (drive them out of house and home, pull them out from inside of their head) but for Mihashi has the added effect of plucking his heart clear from his skin. He stands up wavery and hollow, pulse beating hard in his wrists and heart held in his glove, and he tests the weight of it. He throws it up and watches it fall, hears the  _ thwack  _ as it slams back down. His pulse flutters again, near the heel of his hand this time, right where his thumb joins to the bigger fleshy mass of his hand, and he blinks.

There’s something happening here- Mihashi is eight years old but he knows enough to know that. Someone circles a hand around his arm, snapping lightly in front of his face until he looks up, dumbstruck and stricken, mouth falling open and head gone blank. He is eight years old and his shirt is a baggy, bright red tank top, and his hair is a mess of ginger-brown and he’s skinny enough that when the hand drops from his arm to his wrist it can wrap all the way around with room to spare. He is eight years old, and when the blurry mass of skin and bones he’s looking at finally coalesces into his friend Hamada, he’s so lost on the feeling of it that he can’t say a word. Skinny little eight year olds and their skinny little bird-bones aren’t built to withstand the weight of emotional revelation; he feels his spine groaning, his skinned knee throbbing painfully in time with the _thump thump thump_ of his head splitting in two.

“ _ Dude, _ ” Hamada says in the wide-eyed, near-reverent way that can only be pulled off by a nine-year-old who just saw a friend do something unfathomably stupid. “ _ Dude _ , your nose is bleeding.”

Mihashi claps his free hand up to his nose and finds that it is, indeed, bleeding, and now he’s got some of it smeared all over his palm. He looks down at it only half in his body, notes the skin and blood and dirt in the same way that one would notice the door to their room, and then suddenly remembers who and what he is and bursts into tears.

“ _ Crap! _ ” Hamada gasps. He lets go of Mihashi’s wrist and reaches up towards his face, wiping the tears off and flicking them to the sides. The other children disperse grumbling because this situation is as regular as the rising of the sun, and they grow bored very, very easily. Somewhere nearby one of them starts up their baseball game again, and Mihashi and Hamada fall to distant memory.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry!” Hamada continues, the words lisped slightly brought the gap in his teeth. He looks frantically from side to side as Mihashi continues to sob, tears blending into the mucus and blood that have begun tracing over his chin. It feels  _ gross.  _ Mihashi feels  _ gross  _ and he feels deliriously happy and deliriously sad and outright  _ delirious,  _ like he’s ten times too big for his scrawny eight-year-old body. His ribcage is going to bend and break. His heart is in his hands, and there’s blood gushing from his nose, and Hamada is squishing the skin of his cheeks, mashing them up against his cheekbones and looking vaguely panicked before letting him go entirely and clapping his hands to the side of his own face.

“Right,” he says, shaking his head once then twice. “Right. You gotta pinch your nose and tilt your head forward! That’s what my mom always tells me to do!”

Mihashi doesn’t hear him. Mihashi is panicking. The ball tumbles from his glove and to the ground, bouncing pathetically once or twice before rolling to a stop in a patch of grass nearby. Misashi would pick it up but one of his hands is too big for his body (and in part not his hand at all) and the other is still scrabbling over his face, and neither one of those things really lends itself well to  _ picking things up. _ But Hamada swears- like a nine year old,  _ ah, hell! _ \- and stops his rambling to go and pick it up himself, carefully curling his fingers over the laces and then returning to Mihashi again, cautious and slow. Mihashi’s nose is still dripping blood. He is still overwhelmingly in love. 

“Let’s get you inside,” Hamada murmurs, taking one of Mihashi’s stick-arms into his hand and tugging him lightly along. “And I told you to pinch your nose and tilt your head forward! You  _ have  _ to listen to me, I’m older than you!”

And newfound love be  _ da- _ be  _ dam-  _ be  _ darned,  _ Hamada is  _ older  _ so Mihashi has to  _ listen. _

He reaches one hand up to his nose. The other is still covered by the baseball glove and love it as he might and unwilling to give it up as he may be, that baseball glove belongs to Hamada so back to Hamada it will go, fast before Mihashi gets his blood and sweat and tears all over it.

“Your… your glove,” he manages, words garbled by his pinched-shut nose. He fumbles with it, sees if he can’t brace his hand against his chest and wriggle it off that way, but Hamada just gives him a stern look.

“How bout this,” Hamada says, moving his hand to tap him on the back. Mihashi stumbles forwards a scant few steps, clutching the glove to his chest with one hand and his nose with the other. “You can have it! You earned it after that crazy catch, and I’ve been saving up to get another one, one of the  _ real  _ fancy ones. You’d put it to good use anyways, right?”

It’s all Mihashi can do to nod. His mouth is crumpled in on itself, pulled into a tightly wavy line like it’s been pulled through a drawstring. There’s that terrible rush of feeling again, the butterflies and their bubbles in the pit of his stomach, but he holds it close to him anyways and lets the sound of his heartbeat fill the hollow between the edges of the glove and the curve of his chest. Hamada pulls him along inside, talking all the while, and though Mihashi understands nothing of him he’s thankful all the same; Hamada is nice, nicer, the nicest person of all. Hamada is nine years old, a good few centimeters taller than Mihashi, and a very patient person. 

Hamada’s still his friend regardless of the way that Mihashi locks up when he tries to speak to people. Hamada still keeps a hold on him as they struggle up the rickety old staircase and to the big red door that swings open all by itself on windy nights, past the living room and into the kitchen where Mihashi’s mother is reading the back of a box of something or other. She takes one looks at Mihashi, bloodied and tearstained and smiling a wide, gap-toothed smile as he runs his thumb over the ridges of the -of  _ his _ \- glove again and again, over and over, tracing the folds and ridges and the small divot in the back, and makes a strangled noise. Mihashi hears it like his head’s underwater. There is dirt beneath his fingernails; there is more once he digs them into the leather, feels the creases tracing over the material. His mother makes a series of horrified squeaks, each higher pitched than the last, and dives to scrabble in a drawer until she comes up, breathing heavy and triumphant, with a wad of napkins clutched in her hand. 

“What on earth  _ happened _ ?” she gasps as she lightly pushes Mihashi’s hand off of his nose and replaces it with her own. 

“He fell! He went to catch a ball and then he fell over and then his nose started bleedin’.”

“Mom,” Mihashi says at the same time. His voice is thin and reedy on a good day, as papery and easy to poke holes through as his skin, but it’s jarring enough in the thick air of the kitchen- saturated with heat and the sharp smell of spice- that they both swing to look at him. 

“Mom,” Mihashi says again. 

He’s unable to say much more, but his mother’s always had something of a knack for filling in the blanks, and his words couldn’t say half as much as his wide smile or his death grip on (his,  _ his _ ) glove or the subtle redirect of his priorities away from their aimless wandering and towards something not  _ quite  _ new but so much more important to him than he knows how to say. It's the most lucid that Mihashi has been throughout the whole of his short life and his mother knows, and Hamada knows, so as they sit there all three of them with Mihashi and his glove and the tissues shoved up his nose, and the weight of his single word and all that lies unsaid behind it hanging between them. The sun is streaming through the window in a fiery orange as the dust motes drift idly back and forth and back and forth, and then and there Mihashi knows that he’s given up something of himself, fed a little piece of his soul to something in his stomach, and he’s never getting it back.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving a comment if you enjoyed!! I love hearing from you guys!!!


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